It’s come around again, election time, all over the world.
Off we go, again, billions are being spent to try and convince us that so and so is going to sort it all out for us. So and so is going to lead us gently and lovingly towards a better place where we will be richer, happier and ecstatic that we voted them into power. Around and around we go, election after election, voting and hoping, voting and hoping.
A Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet, printed in 1981, came up with this : “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” A quotation often attributed to others but it is a valuable insight when we look at elections, voting and what politicians actually do.
During my life I don’t know how often I’ve heard people say something like “all politicians are bloody liars”. Asked if they go out to vote they will reply “of course! It’s important.” A contradiction which is difficult to understand, unless we bear in mind the Narcotics Anonymous aphorism.
David Boyd UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment from 2018 to April 2024 :“It has driven me crazy in the past six years that governments are just oblivious to history. We know that the tobacco industry lied through their teeth for decades. The lead industry did the same. The asbestos industry did the same. The plastics industry has done the same. The pesticide industry has done the same.”
Louis Verchot, at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia : “Unfortunately climate change has become a political wedge issue … I wonder how deep the crisis needs to become before we all start rowing in the same direction.”
Climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota:“After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”
Rio Grande do Sul has been hit by massive floods despite the authorities being warned 20 years ago that climate change would make such flooding more frequent and more severe. The elected leaders did virtually nothing to improve flood defences, now they are shrieking about how they are helping the flood victims and how much money they are going to spend to do so. The cart before the horse, reacting to a catastrophe isn’t the same as acting beforehand to mitigate it.
Just one story amongst thousands, catastrophes reveal the inadequacy of the current political systems and in particular the incompetence and/or the dishonesty of the political elite.
The whole system is a fetid mess that has gotten worse over the years. Today the political elites hire mercenary ‘influencers’ to spread their word, they will say anything, do anything in their desperation to stay in the ‘corridors of power’. AI is now an arm in the war of lies; deep-fakes, both video and audio, creep around and it is now even more difficult to work out where there might be a grain of truth.
The non-mercenary scientists who try and present realistic analyses on what confronts us go unheard. Those people who are trying to put real measures into place receive far less funding than governments give in subsidies to big oil. Sometimes a political leader catches on to how serious it all is, Thatcher did so in 1990, yet very soon afterwards she did a U turn and “The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. Clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.” The battle to save our biosphere became some sort of Socialist plot.
There was a banner article in a national UK newspaper recently: ‘Ursula von der Leyen is now a household name – and that could be Europe’s salvation’. So everything is going to be alright, we have someone in place who is going to save us, at least in Europe. More hero worshipping nonsense that denies the reality that even were it true that der Leyen really wanted to act she is hampered by the political ecosystem in which she finds herself. The European Parliament is surrounded by the offices of the big lobbies, oil, farming, plastics etc.
On top of that is that fact that, when getting ‘power’, these politicians can, and often do, act in their own interests rather than for the common good. Der Leyens’ pony got killed by a wolf and just afterwards she announced “The concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans.” Is there a link? If so then it would be ideal that these elected leaders suffer floods, famine, poverty and wildfires, maybe then they would wake up and see what is happening to people, to us. Each catastrophe kills people, at the very least 100 people in Rio Grande do Sul. At least 50 people killed by floods in Northern Afghanistan, at least 228 people in Kenya. Lives lost and thousands of others ripped apart by weather events made worse and more frequent by global climatic forcing, as predicted by scientists over the last few decades.
One of the things a Permaculture designer will do is analyse a system in order to work out what works well, what needs improvement and what needs to be removed or stopped. Applied to most countries and their political systems it is pretty difficult to find anything that ‘works well’.
This Permaculture analysis would seem to lead us to the conclusion that politicians and the current systems are making things worse, either by inaction or by collusion with big industry. In that case they are both things ‘that need to be removed or stopped.’ The idea that they are things ‘which need improvement’ seems unrealistic and naive. At this point I should mention that I’m not an ‘anarchist’. I am a Permaculture designer and a part of the discipline of being a designer is cultivating a certain detachment in order to better understand a system. As a person anger, rage, frustration can all be there but as a designer I have to put them to one side. As a person I have no affiliation to any political party, that’s a personal choice, as a designer it’s deliberate.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating things is best encapsulated in this quote from Bill Mollison "although the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple"
This view is supported by the IPCC, “The evidence is clear: the time for action is now. We can halve emissions by 2030.”
We are shooting past 1.5°C of global heating and that 2.5° or worse seems virtually inevitable, that we are “We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing … And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” (António Guterres). One wonders what we can do. Yet we know what the solutions are and they are both simple and complex (using the term in it’s scientific sense). We know too that the politicians we elect have failed and are failing to act and that in the main they are making things worse.
Protests, throwing paint, blocking roads and all the other ways that well meaning people are using to try and get governments to act aren’t working either. In fact they are encouraging governments to become more and more repressive, and the arbitrary use of so-called non-lethal crowd control weapons is rife. These are projectile and chemical weapons that aren’t non-lethal, they are less-lethal and should be described this way, “They are as dangerous as the person firing them wants them to be,” says physician and human rights activist Rohini Haar. Governments aren’t allowed to use Tear gas in warfare since the 1925 Geneva Protocol. No international treaty bans countries from using it against their own citizens. The Venom remote-controlled launcher is capable of firing up to 30 tear-gas or flash-bang canisters at a time.
The repression of protesters now includes the confiscation, by the police or army, of anything that they think might be used as a weapon. Here in France the definition of what constitutes a ‘weapon’ is quite incredible, a mask (even a COVID style one) is considered a weapon, cameras, googles, cycling helmets the same. Any protest is met by an overwhelming force of heavily armoured and armed riot police. Environmental movements are infiltrated by police ‘moles’, getting permission to organise a protest is becoming harder and harder. The polemic spewed out by governments is that these measures are there to protect property yet the vast majority of the protests are peaceful, until that is the police start shooting.
So where does all this take us? It should lead us to the conclusion that the current system of centralised governments run by incompetent or dishonest people has to change. Perhaps we can to ensure that the people elected are honest and competent? They will, however, find themselves in a political ecosystem that will hinder, cancel or deform their efforts, this is borne out by David Boyd UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment as quoted above.
The analyses done by Permaculture designers since it’s origins have led us to place a huge importance on creating solid, ethical, diverse and equitable local governance adapted to local needs. In this paradigm we all act locally to sort this mess out, everyone helping, everyone involved. These local systems are linked together so each community helps look after the local bioregion. The paradigm includes respect, for others within the local community and those in the other ones. We have to all work together if we want to put into place the policies that will mean we can mitigate climatic forcing, address the consequences of the forcing we have created and in many cases simply survive.
So far the strategy of hoping that the next person to whom I give my vote isn’t working and we need to get away from the “Insanity of repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.”
As Mollison maintained “First feel fear, then get angry. Then go with your life into the fight.” The most effective and rapid way to get into the fight is to get on with it, hands-on, at home. That’s what I’m doing as are an untold number of others worldwide. Not just the more than 3 million people, in more than 140 countries, who are trained and experienced in Permaculture design there are many, many others too.